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Google's ANGLE certified as OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant

Google's open source ANGLE, the "Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine" which brings OpenGL ES 2.0 support to Windows without relying on OpenGL drivers, has passed the complete test suite for the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification. Version 1.0 of ANGLE has also been certified as a compliant OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation. The certification was announced by Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer for the Chromium project, writing on the Chromium blog.

ANGLE was originally created in order to seamlessly enable the use of WebGL content in the Chrome browser on the Windows platform. Although Mac OS X and Linux have solid OpenGL support, OpenGL drivers on Windows are not as widely available as Google would like. To solve this problem, the ANGLE system translates calls to OpenGL into DirectX 9 API calls. For this to work though, the target system should have no OpenGL drivers installed so that the system can access hardware-accelerated 3D graphics with WebGL.

ANGLE not only enables OpenGL ES 2.0 commands to be issued within the Chrome browser's graphics system; the ANGLE technology, as BSD licensed open source, is also available to third party applications. Firefox, for example, already uses ANGLE for displaying WebGL content on Windows.